Rob Banks for Love (John Wojtowicz Graphic with 70'S Punk Effect/Dog Day Afternoon)

John Wojtowicz 

Before Al Pacino yelled “Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon, there was John Wojtowicz—and the true story was even stranger than the movie.

Wojtowicz was a Vietnam veteran, former bank teller, and an unmistakable character in New York’s early-1970s gay liberation scene. Using the nickname Littlejohn Basso, he attended meetings and events at the Gay Activists Alliance’s famous Firehouse in SoHo and participated in demonstrations demanding marriage rights for gay couples. He was outspoken, sexually uninhibited, frequently outrageous, and by accounts from fellow activists, not always the easiest person to have representing the movement.

In 1971, Wojtowicz met Elizabeth Eden, a trans woman who would become his partner. The two held a highly publicized wedding ceremony at a time when legal recognition of their relationship was unimaginable. Their complicated relationship would soon become part of one of the strangest crimes in New York history.

On August 22, 1972, Wojtowicz and accomplices attempted to rob a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn. The plan collapsed almost immediately and turned into a 14-hour hostage standoff, complete with police, FBI agents, television cameras, crowds of spectators, pizza deliveries, and Wojtowicz performing for practically everyone watching.

Wojtowicz said he wanted the money to help pay for Eden’s gender-affirming surgery, although people close to the case later disputed whether that was the robbery’s sole motivation. Whatever the full truth, the combination of crime, sexuality, gay liberation, gender identity, and tabloid spectacle made the story unlike anything America had seen before.

Hollywood came calling. The robbery inspired Sidney Lumet’s brilliant Dog Day Afternoon (1975), with Pacino playing the fictionalized Wojtowicz as Sonny Wortzik and John Cazale as his accomplice Sal. The film became one of the defining movies of 1970s New York—and brought an extraordinarily messy queer story into mainstream American cinemas.

Wojtowicz was no uncomplicated gay-rights hero. He was contradictory, volatile, criminal, and larger than life. But he was also openly queer at a moment when doing so could carry enormous consequences, and his story collided head-on with the rapidly changing LGBTQ+ world of post-Stonewall New York.